Hello lovely pledgers,

Firstly, welcome and thankyou to our most recent pledgers - we are thrilled to have you on board. 

Things have been a bit quiet in the shed lately, mainly because Janet and I have been preparing for the inaugural Lido Conference. That took place last weekend, in Portishead, and we feel really pleased and enthused with the way it went. The feedback we've had was very positive and we are already getting the bones of a plan laid down for next year. You can follow @natlidoconf as well as the @lidoguide twitter accounts to be sure of getting details as and when we have them. There is also a facebook group called National Lido Conference - pledgers very welcome! 

We talked to delegates and speakers alike about the Lido Guide, and the overhwelming feeling was that pools themselves see the benefits of the kind of visibility this book might give them. We already have the direct support of some pools, and we hope others will join their ranks. For us, this book is all about the pools and we really want to drive* swimmers to them to help sustain them into the future. 

We learned a few things from the confernece that I think are worth sharing:

1: It is indeed possible to talk about nothing but lidos for 36 hours and still have an insatiable appetite for it.

2: All that lido talk makes a person thirsty, we think we could probably fill Tooting Bec with the volume of tea and coffee drunk over the weekend :-)

3: Shopping trollies are a conference organiser's best friend when your venue is up two flights of stairs.

4: Vintage and knitted swimming costumes are this season's interior design must.

5: You can never grow out of stickers.

6: The majority vote is for the pronunciation 'lido', not 'leedo'... apart from in Yorkshire, where it is pronounced 'pool'.

Hopefully we will see some of you at the 2017 Lido Conference. Watch this sapce, and please keep spreading the word about the Lido Guide.

Thanks for all your support.

Emma.

*Not literally, so for all you entrepreneurs out there the Lido Taxi concept remains up for grabs!